Mechanisms to control individual user accounts are becoming a more common feature in multi-user operating systems. For example, User Account Control (“UAC”) is a new security component in Windows Vista®. UAC enables lower privileged “standard users” to perform administrative actions in Vista® without having to log off and log back on as an administrator, switch between user accounts, or use the Run As feature. (A “standard user” account is synonymous with a user account in Windows XP®.) In Vista®, any user who is a member of the local Administrators group can run most applications as a standard user. When attempting to perform an administrative action, the user is provided with a consent dialog, prompting them to indicate whether or not they want the action to proceed. (A user who is not already authenticated as an administrator is presented with an authentication dialog, requiring the user to provide administrative credentials to continue.)
Users are typically presented with such dialogs when attempting to install new software, or make system changes. This frequent prompting has led to complaints that the feature is too invasive, and at the same time too hard for end users to understand. For sophisticated users who know what actions are and are not safe to perform, the constant popping-up of dialogs is an unproductive inconvenience. For users who do not know what actions are safe to perform, the dialogs are not only annoying but confusing as well. Prompting users to indicate whether or not they would like to proceed with an action is not helpful for users who do not know what the affects of the action would be.
This problem is compounded in the case in which a single user manages a plurality of other users and/or uses or manages multiple computer systems. Currently UAC responds to specific events by providing an individual user with a Yes/No confirmation prompt. The user's response is only applied for that user on that machine. Even where the same user manages multiple machines, the same prompt appears on each separate machine in response to the event. Where the user manages multiple users on one or more machine(s), the same prompt is repeated for each user in response to the event, even in the case of multiple users of the same machine. Considering the large number of events for which these prompts appear, this results in a great deal of annoying dialog pop-ups, which in many cases are not even helpful or clear to the end user. It would be desirable to provide relief for this problem.